The present disclosure relates generally to methods and apparatus for testing pixel information.
DisplayPort is the latest digital display interface defined by VESA. See, for example, articles such as A self-test BOST for High-frequency PLLs, DLLs, and SerDes, Stephen Sunter & Aubin Royansuz, ITC' 2006; VESA DisplayPort Link Layer Compliance Test Standard Version 1.0, Sep. 14, 2007, VESA; and VESA DisplayPort Standard, Version 1, Revision la, Jan. 11, 2008, VESA. One of the challenges in the implementation of DisplayPort, DVI or other suitable display link, is testing of, for example, 1.62 Gbps and 2.7 Gbps operation at a reasonable cost. This high speed pixel information is typically generated by a pixel generation circuit such as one or more graphics (and/or video) cores for output to a digital display such as an LCD (or other type of display) of a computer, digital television, handheld device or other device. One method would be to use the ATE (Automated Test Equipment) high-speed channel to measure the eye pattern and capture thousands of cycles of data patterns; however, it is expensive and impractical (due to long test time). In addition, it is difficult to distinguish a failure at ATE compared with a possible failure at the LCD panel.